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Michael Otey is president of TECA, a technical content production, consulting and software development company in Portland, Ore. Michael is a former SQL Server MVP and was Senior Technical Director for Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Pro. He covers the topics of SQL Server, Windows Server, Hyper-V, Azure, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, VMware vSphere, PowerShell and .NET development. Michael has written hundreds of technical articles and performed numerous hardware and software product reviews. He does frequent webcasts, is a presenter at IT/Dev Connections and other technical conferences and has written several books on SQL Server and .NET development.
Last Update: Mar 12, 2024
SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBM) developed by Microsoft that competes with Oracle, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and other RDBMs. In this article, I’ll explain in detail what SQL Server is and go through its release history over the past three decades. I’ll also detail what are the different SQL Server versions…
SQL Server is a relational database. But what is a relational database exactly? Mike Otey, our resident SQL Server expert, explains in this article. What is a relational database? A relational database is a type of data storage mechanism that organizes data into tables where each table consists of rows and columns. It is typically…
In this article, we’ll examine some of the main challenges of today’s backup and disaster recovery procedures. Then, we’ll dive into the top five most important features to look for in an on-premises Veeam storage solution for your backups. Data protection is one of the most critical tasks for IT administrators, and there is no…
Last Update: Feb 15, 2024
A Windows Server Active Directory (AD) forest is the topmost logical container in an AD configuration. In this article, Michael Otey explains the role forests play in an AD configuration and why it is necessary to consolidate Active Directory forests and domains to improve security and management. Every Active Directory deployment contains at least one forest, the parent container in…
Last Update: Dec 20, 2023
Databases are the primary containers for your SQL Server relational database objects. Some of the main relational database objects that are contained in SQL Server databases include: tables, schema, indexes, views, logins, security and roles. You can create a SQL database plus there are a number of built-in SQL system databases including the master, model, msdb and tempdb databases. Technically, SQL Server supports a…
Last Update: Nov 28, 2023
In this guide you’ll see how to install Windows 11 or perform an upgrade to Windows 11 from Windows 10. Installing Windows 11 is quite different than the previous versions of Windows. For the earlier versions, you typically needed to plan for the installation then go get the installation media, insert it into your computer,…
Once you have created a user database, you can begin to create tables using the SQL CREATE TABLE statement. Databases typically have many different tables. If you haven’t yet created your first database in SQL Server, check out this article on Petri about how to create a SQL database using the SQL CREATE DATABASE statement. Tables are structures…
Last Update: Nov 02, 2023
Tables are one of the core components of every relational database system and SQL Server is no different. Tables store the data that the relational database engine uses for queries, reports, and other operations. In this article, I’ll show you how to modify data from a SQL Server table using T-SQL INSERT, T-SQL UPDATE, T-SQL…
Last Update: Nov 02, 2023
SQL Server is Microsoft’s premier enterprise database platform. But in today’s world of rapid-fire releases and continuous updates, the new SQL Server 2022 release seems like it has been a long time in coming. But it includes some great new features. SQL Server 2019 was the last major release of SQL Server. With every release,…
Last Update: Oct 17, 2023
In this SQL Server Management Studio tutorial (SSMS), I will show you the primary database management and development capabilities provided by the tool. Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is the primary management and development tool for SQL Server and has been since its release back with SQL Server 2000. SSMS provides a graphical interface…